Making a Successful CIO Transition

WEBINAR:On-Demand

Mark Katz discusses the myriad challenges and opportunities he faced as he changed industries and jobs to become the new CIO of ASCAP.

By Pat O’Connell

Switching industries for a CIO creates both challenges and opportunities to make a quick impact. Mark Katz, CIO of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), talks about what it takes to make a successful transition.

Katz’s career began in financial services and steadily progressed in a number of firms before he become the CIO of a major reinsurer. When moving to ASCAP this time last year, Katz’s goal was to turn IT into a leaner, more agile organization. With the full support of the executive management team, he undertook some significant challenges to turn around the IT department.

“When I arrived, the teams were in silos, with some operating independently, dedicated to certain users, and not effectively communicating to other team members about what and how they were providing solutions,” says Katz. “IT was acting in some capacities as an order taker for a great number of break/fix projects. There was little transparency across the entire project portfolio. Most salient, however, was that larger projects were using a traditional waterfall approach methodology. Probably of more concern, though, was that all requested changes were granted for each business request, with less of an eye toward the overall impact to the portfolio, the business and the technology department. In addition, there were some ‘stealth’ projects that had no real business case in a lot of instances.” Katz worked with ASCAP COO Al Wallace, his senior IT team and business line leaders to bring about transparent and meaningful governance.

Initially, Katz invested a great deal of time with the business users to understand their needs and priorities, and a lot of time with his staff, including one-on-one meetings with every IT member, as he worked on changing the culture in IT as part of a planned re-organization of the department.

Katz next addressed IT methodologies. “I’m a big fan of the agile methodology and self-organized teams,” he says. After spending some time first understanding ASCAP’s culture, Katz wanted to ensure that agile was properly introduced to the firm. “Indeed, agile represents much more than a methodology change,” he says. “It is about alignment, transparency and commitment in partnership with the business: adoption through real ‘opting in.’ With this new approach, IT now has a more informed seat at the table with the business, and we’ve been able to get key business people to fully participate in agile scrums. However, to really ensure that agile was adopted at ASCAP, open space meetings were held where business users and technology staff participated. Attendance was excellent.”

Open space meetings represent a repeatable technique for getting a rapid and lasting agile adoption. It’s based on the hypothesis that human engagement is what actually powers genuine and lasting agile adoptions.

“In terms of the mechanics of agile, we start by writing the epic story for each product team, then breaking the story down into sprints, all prioritized by the business, working through the product owners,” says Katz. “Then we have the daily 15-minute scrum with a view to releasing useable software every two to three weeks. Our approach is “yes, we can,” not “no, we can’t.” Change is always welcomed, even late in a sprint. The business users decide the priorities, and the scrums are very candid and very honest. This has led to velocity, but, more importantly, to vastly improved communication with the business lines.”

Another key initiative for Katz was governance, and he developed a project management office (PMO) for the major systems projects. “The PMO is creating integrated process workflows across the company. Its charter is to provide increased transparency that further builds upon business trust. ASCAP leverages a federated governance model with full business and IT participation. Large projects over a certain threshold are approved on an up or down vote via the executive committee. All other projects are assessed for synergies and duplication and then prioritized with the business.” Katz collaborated with the Wallace, the COO, to ensure a full business case was presented for the significant projects.

Articles by Type

Contact Us

Advertiser Disclosure:
Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which QuinStreet receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. QuinStreet does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.